Poland and Israel should not still be arguing over the Holocaust. But they are, and in recent days tensions have escalated to the point of a looming diplomatic crisis. The subject of their heated quarrel is a new Polish measure making it a crime — punishable by three years in prison — to suggest aloud or in writing that Poland was in any way complicit in the extermination of Europe’s Jews on Polish soil during World War II.

“We, the Poles, were victims, as were the Jews,” Deputy Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said before Thursday’s vote by in Warsaw’s parliament. “It is a duty of every Pole to defend the good name of Poland.”

Leaving that dubious obligation of citizenship aside, here’s the trivia question of the week: Who was blaming Poles for the Holocaust in the first place? The culprits may surprise you. Or maybe not. The answer is: Barack Obama and — I kid you not — James Comey.

In 2012, while awarding a posthumous Medal of Freedom to Polish resistance fighter-turned-revered Georgetown University professor Jan Karski, President Obama mentioned a “Polish death camp.” It was an insensitive way to refer to camps erected by German military forces inside occupied Poland, and it rankled Warsaw. The White House issued a clarification, which Polish officials found half-hearted, but that might have been the end of it — except that three years later James Comey entered the historical stage. The FBI director was the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he expanded on Obama’s clumsy language.

“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil,” Comey said. “They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do … and that should truly frighten us.”

This was no sloppy staff work by a speechwriter. This was vintage Jim Comey. He set himself up as the hero of his story. (His talk was titled “Why I Require FBI Agents to Visit the Holocaust Museum.”) He didn’t just blame the Nazis, or even Germans, he indicted numerous unnamed citizens of Poland and Hungary, too. No Polish government officials were present, but the man who often quotes himself on Twitter thought enough of his own speech to excerpt it for the Washington Post. His piece, which employed the first-person singular some 30 times, drew unfavorable notice in Poland, and not because of its use of Comey’s favorite pronoun.

It appeared just as a massive refugee crisis was roiling European politics, giving rise to impulses of nativism and nationalism not unlike those in the United States. Obama’s and Comey’s perceived anti-Poland slights became part of Warsaw’s legislative debate over the ban against accusing Poles of colluding with Nazis. Incongruously, it passed Poland’s lower house of parliament on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was approved overwhelmingly in the upper chamber Thursday and now awaits the signature of President Andrzej Duda, who disingenuously pronounced himself “flabbergasted” by outraged reaction in Israel and from various international Jewish groups.

“We absolutely can’t back down,” Duda said. “We have the right to defend the historical truth.”

Truth is an interesting word here. “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” proclaimed American Protestant writers Sherwood Eddy and Kirby Page in “The Abolition of War.” Radicalized into pacifists by the carnage of World War I, they published it in 1924. Meanwhile, a decorated German Army veteran spent that year in prison where he produced a very different book, which he titled “Mein Kampf.”

Adolf Hitler’s memoir posits its own set of truths. Among them: that World War I was “the greatest of all experiences” and that Germany hadn’t lost on the battlefield — it had been stabbed in the back by Jews, Marxists, and weak-willed civilians. This was crazy, but “Mein Kampf” sold more than a million copies and helped persuade a once-great nation to believe in these myths and follow its author on a path toward untold suffering and death.

An estimated 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland in September 1939 when it was carved up by the Germans and the Soviets. When the war ended, 3 million Polish Jews were gone. The first Nazi concentration camp, at Dachau, was built in Germany, but the six deadliest camps, including Auschwitz and Treblinka, were built in Poland.

This was German efficiency, not Polish complicity. Poles of all descriptions suffered a frightful price at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviets. Until March of 1942, the majority of Poles at Auschwitz were non-Jews, and by the war’s end, an estimated 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians had been murdered.

Sensitive Jewish writers tackled this subject gingerly. “In postwar Jewish memory, in the minds of many Holocaust survivors and their descendants, Poland has come to figure as the very heart of darkness, the central symbol of the inferno,” wrote Eva Hoffman in an evocative book about the tragic fate of Poland’s Jewish villages. “Our psyches are associative: because the Holocaust happened there, because so many people were tortured and murdered on its soil, Poland became scorched earth, contaminated ground.”

She added, presciently, that linking of Poland with the genocide involves “a form of partial memory,” which leaves modern Poles feeling defensive, even bitter. But then the world heard from a Warsaw-born college Princeton professor named Jan T. Gross, and a northeast Polish village called Jedwabne. In his shocking 2001 book, “Neighbors,” Gross unearthed the horror of a hot summer day there — when half of the town’s populace murdered the other half — the Jewish half.

By the time the sun set on July 10, 1941, all 1,600 of Jedwabne’s Jews had been killed — shot, bludgeoned, knifed, and drowned, some tortured first — the last 340 of them locked in a barn and burned alive. Similar horrors occurred in other nearby villages, not by German occupiers, although certainly with their approval. So, James Comey wasn’t wrong. He spoke the truth. Yet, if Warsaw gets its way, even talking about these pogroms will be a crime, which is itself a kind of atrocity.

If anti-Semitism is “the oldest hatred,” as is often said, it is also the hardest to root out. In our country, campus movements claiming to be “anti-Zionist” or “anti-Israel” devolve almost instantly into Jew-bashing. The same is true of the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” movement that seeks to cripple Israel economically. If those supposedly monitoring this country’s “hate groups” applied the same standards they use for conservative organizations, these pro-Palestinian groups would be lumped in with the Klan. The BDS crowd says it supports “human rights,” but that’s hard to square with its members’ oft-expressed admiration for Hitler — and Jewish genocide.

Last week, the U.N. human rights office announced plans to isolate companies that do business in Israel’s settlements. This back-door BDS approach was promptly denounced by Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Sen. Marco Rubio called it, quite correctly, a form of “economic warfare against the Jewish State.”

Some Americans are unnerved that the U.S. seems to stand alone against world opinion when it comes to Israel. We shouldn’t be. We should wonder about the rest of the world instead — not apologize for standing up against tribal hatreds. We should shout aloud the words “Never again!”